THE AUTHORITIES OF BASLE TAKE NOTICE OF HIS BOOK. HE WRITES TWO DIALOGUES BY WAY OF APPENDIX TO IT AND LEAVES SWITZERLAND. Failing to make any impression on the Swiss and German Reformers whose countenance he had been so anxious to gain, we have seen Servetus in his letter to Œcolampadius declaring his readiness to quit Basle, to which he must have returned, if it were only not said that he went as a fugitive, and giving something like an engagement to his correspondent to review and, reviewing, to modify or retract some things he had said in his book. That some such engagement was given we conclude from the letter of Œcolampadius to the magistrates of Basle, to which we shall refer immediately, and from which it would seem that it was through the forbearance, if not even the more friendly interference, of the Reformer that our author escaped arrest and imprisonment at this time. The seven books or chapters on erroneous ideas of the Trinity had not fallen stillborn from the press; neither had the presence of the writer in Basle passed unobserved. The book being seen as heretical in the highest degree by the ministers, the presence of its writer among them was felt as matter of grievance by both clergy and laity; so that the Civic Council held it within the scope of their duties to take notice of the innovator, of whom they heard so much that was discreditable, and, by laying hands on him, either to make him pay in person then and there, or to send him away, like an infected bale, to spread his poison elsewhere.